Nearly half of iPad launch apps will be new games

Apple's share of handheld gaming market quadruples in last year

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Next week should be a fun and interesting one in the world of tech, what with the traditional April's fool gags dominating the tail-end of the week, swiftly followed by Apple's iPad launch in the US on Saturday 3 April.

The iPad is still very much an unknown quantity, with those developers that have been allowed access to one still being forced by Apple to keep it locked in a dark room (seriously).

However, it looks like Apple is set to make handheld and mobile gaming a major part of the iPad launch, something which has continued to grow in popularity over the last two years on the iPhone and the iPod touch.

Flurry of activity

Indeed, a new report from Flurry Analytics shows that Apple's casual gaming business has very nearly quadrupled between where it was at in 2008 and where it was at a year later in 2009.

The PSP, in turn, fell from a 20% share in 2008 to only 11% of US revenue last year.

Nintendo, for its part, is concentrating on the forthcoming Nintendo 3DS announcement, set to wow the gaming hacks and industry pundits at E3 this year.

TechRadar has had no word, as yet, on whether or not Apple will have any official presence at this year's show.

Perhaps most interesting of all the data that comes out of Flurry's latest report into portable gaming is the fact that the analysts claim that 44 per cent of apps being tested on iPads this month are games, followed by entertainment (14%), social networking (7%), sports (6%), travel (5%) and books (3%).